Thursday, October 03, 2013

Elderly Veterans Feel Obama’s Wrath

KAREN BLEIER/GETTY IMAGES

World War II veterans overtook the gates blocking access to the World War II Memorial in Washington.

President Obama’s Machiavellian drive to hurt and irritate Americans to win the budget fight kicked into high gear this week as jackbooted police refused to allow World War II veterans to make a pilgrimage to the open-air Washington, D.C., memorial that was created to honor them.

As a whiff of fascism blows through the nation’s capital, the president is demonstrating to the whole world how revoltingly out-of-control the hyper-bloated U.S. government is. Obama is doing petty, irritating things like needlessly shutting down national parks in order to rankle voters in the hope they’ll blame Republicans for the ongoing government shutdown. Liberals, in typical fashion, predict apocalypse because of the shutdown. In reality, Americans are barely noticing that Uncle Sam is taking a nap.

Around two dozen members of Congress, including Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), have been ignoring the guards and conducting their own tours of the National World War Two Memorial on the National Mall. They’ve been leading the “Honor Flight” veterans around the barriers now popularly called “barrycades” to show them the national shrine that honors them for their service. Many of the veterans are making these trips for the first time but they are so advanced in age it may also be their last visit to the site.

The National Park Service claims the memorial and the entire National Mall area had to be closed because of the ongoing government shutdown.

In reality, it’s a case of the eminently impeachable President Obama punishing the American people, sadistically causing them pain for no reason other than to get them mad at his political enemies.

Blogger Doug Ross deconstructs Obama’s nonsense, likening the president “to a petulant six-year old throwing a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his own way.”

Obama has “intentionally shut the door on veterans visiting — for perhaps the last time in their lives — under the ‘Honor Flight’ program,” Ross writes. “Now, for those who aren’t aware, this memorial is in an open-air park, it was paid for with private funds, and it is unattended.

According to its website, it is open to the public 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

Obama, who can barely conceal his white-hot hatred of the military, has also ordered that veterans entering the grounds to be arrested.

Good-government group, Judicial Watch, Ross notes, “filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of this outrageous act on the part of an administration that is completely out of control. Governor Sarah Palin also called for civil disobedience.”

President Obama’s favorite union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), sent an ACORN-style rent-a-mob to the World War II memorial to intimidate the elderly veterans who risked their lives for their country.

As Patrick Poole reports at PJ Media, around “20 SEIU protesters arrived on the scene chanting ‘Boehner get us back to work’ and claiming they were federal employees furloughed because of the shutdown.”

The protesters refused to provide proof they actually worked for the federal government. One of the protesters admitted he was paid $15 to show up and protest.

That wasn’t the only federal landmark President Obama has targeted across America.

As Lachlan Markay of the Washingon Free Beacon reports, the National Park Service shuttered a Virginia tourist attraction –its first closure to the public in 40 years– that happens to be located on federal land, even though Uncle Sam does not financially contribute to its maintenance of operation.

Anna Eberly, managing director of the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, said yesterday that NPS ordered the historical-reenactment site to close until Congress begins funding the federal government again. Law enforcement agents marched staff and volunteers from the property on Tuesday, she said.

“You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” Eberly said.

“In all the years I have worked with the National Park Service … I have never worked with a more arrogant, arbitrary and vindictive group representing the NPS,” Eberly said.

The farm begged the Obama administration to let it continue to operate. “Every appeal our Board of Directors made to the NPS administration was denied,” she said, referring to their repeated refusals as “utter crap.”

“We have operated the Farm successfully for 32 years after the NPS cut the Farm from its budget in 1980 and are fully staffed and prepared to open today. But there are barricades at the Pavilions and entrance to the Farm,” she said.

Closing the farm is part of the Obama administration’s drive to use taxpayers and tourists as political pawns in a propaganda maneuver aimed at expanding the size and scope of government.

U.S. Park Ranger Richard Trott places a closed sign on a barricade in front of the World War II Memorial monument in Washington, DC, on October 1, 2013. Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

This approach is called the “Washington Monument Strategy.” The theory is that such minor annoyances amplify the consequences of budget cuts, or in this case, of the government shutdown. The goal is to force congressional Republicans to surrender their principles and agree to fund Obamacare — and in the process look wimpy and lose the support of their grassroots.

The Washington Monument Strategy just as easily fits into the world of community organizing. Anyone familiar with the methods of modern-day leftist agitators could have seen all of this coming.

Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky taught that the community organizer’s first job is “community disorganization” by which he meant the manufacture of crises designed to inflame the community. The organizer must “create the issues or problems.” He must “rub raw the resentments of the people of the community” and “fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression.”

The organizer must “agitate to the point of conflict” because without friction and controversy “people are not concerned enough to act.” Having harangued the community out of its feelings of complacency, the organizer then directs its rage at specific targets and scapegoats, providing “a channel into which the people can angrily pour their frustrations.”

Obama is on a drive to turn America into a one-party state so naturally his wrath is directed at Republicans. The GOP makes for an easy target because Obama knows the mainstream media won’t blame him for anything bad that happens no matter how painfully obvious his culpability may be. Useful left-wing idiots including NBC’s David Gregory, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, British expellee and disgraced yellow journalist Piers Morgan of CNN, and all-around fraud Paul Krugman of the New York Times have been parroting around the clock the party line that the shutdown is wholly the fault of Republicans.

Republicans themselves are far from united. Many Republicans are haunted by an inordinate fear of being blamed for the shutdown. Discussions of strategy and tactics between these tormented souls nowadays are like episodes of Seinfeld, filled with invented, silly rules and extended debate about the niceties and interstices of etiquette.

They also ignore the fact that congressional Republicans won the shutdown battle with President Clinton in 1995. Contrary to media myth, the Republicans in that conflict got largely what they wanted and did fine in the following congressional election, even gaining Senate seats.

Meanwhile, the ever-fearful Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) may already be preparing to cave in after only a few days of pressure. There has been talk that GOP leadership will soon use the shutdown conflict as cover to force the unpopular immigration amnesty through Congress.

Alarmingly, Robert Costa of National Review Online reports that Boehner “wants to craft a ‘grand bargain’ on fiscal issues as part of the debt-limit deliberations, and during a series of meetings on Wednesday, he urged colleagues to stick with him.”

The revelation came quietly. Boehner called groups of members to his Capitol office all day, taking their temperature on the shutdown and the debt limit. It became clear, members say, that Boehner’s chief goal is conference unity as the debt limit nears, and he’s looking at potentially blending a government-spending deal and debt-limit agreement into a larger budget package.

“’It’s the return of the grand bargain,’ says one House Republican, who requested anonymity to speak freely. ‘There weren’t a lot of specifics discussed, and the meetings were mostly about just checking in. But he’s looking hard at the debt limit as a place where we can do something big.’”

Boehner spokesman Michael Steele refused to shed much light on the situation. “The speaker has always said we’ll need substantial spending cuts and reforms in order to raise the debt limit, like in the debt-limit bill we’ve been discussing, but let’s drop the phrase ‘grand bargain.’ Right now, there’s nothing grand, and there’s no one to bargain with.”

There may, however, be some cause for optimism.

Yesterday Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus offered to have the RNC pay all costs associated with keeping the memorial open.

It was a move of unusual courage and brilliance for the RNC and it may signal that the GOP’s resolve to dig in and fight against the horrendous, nation-destroying program that is Obamacare is stiffening.